March To The Stars

Roger stepped through the door as Kosutic started tearing into the ceiling with long, concentrated bursts of blind fire. His own firepower was more limited, but unlike her, he could actually see the shooter. He flipped up the knife and threw it towards the hole in the ceiling even as he fired at the three crouched targets in the room.

He saw the backs of each of their necks go red, then grunted in anguish as his chameleon suit hardened and the toot threw some more neural stimulation at him. Pain echoed through his chest, and his helmet's HUD flashed a brief schematic of his body with his torso outlined in yellow. But by then he had directed the pistol towards the ceiling, and before the shooter could get off another round, he was credited as a kill. The hostile fell through the hole to the deck, and Roger noted the knife blade buried in the bad guy's left arm.

Roger rotated to the right along the wall, trying to disregard the flashes of pain his toot obediently sent along his nerves each time he moved. At least one rib broken, he estimated. It hurt like hell, but his nanny pack was already deadening the pain—or, at least, his toot was grudgingly acting as if the nanites were doing their job—so he made himself ignore it as he reloaded his pistol.

Then he picked up Julian's bead rifle in place of his own, attached it to his harness' friction strap, and reloaded it, as well. Then he sidled towards the remaining closed door, cradling the rifle in his undamaged left hand.

He looked across at the sergeant major and gestured to the door and the hole in the ceiling, then shrugged. She grimaced back at him and gestured at the ceiling. He nodded, thumbed himself, then jabbed the same thumb upward. She grimaced again, but she also nodded and crouched down, setting her rifle on the floor and interlacing her fingers.

Roger let the friction strap pull Julian's rifle up, drew his pistol again, and stepped over to the sergeant major. He put one boot into her hands, leapt upward into the hole—

—and slammed into the intact deck overhead.

* * *

The next thing he knew, he was on the floor, clutching his head and neck in pain (which was not at all simulated) as Kosutic, Julian, and Despreaux tried not to laugh.

'Clear VR,' the sergeant major said, and the simulator's AI obeyed, although Roger was half-surprised it could understand the command through her laughter. She leaned over him, and shook her head in an odd mixture of amusement and contrition.

'Satan and Lucifer,' she got out. 'I'm sorry about that, Your Highness. Are you okay?'

Roger lay on the floor of the poorly lit hold, clutching his neck and stared up at her—and the completely solid deckhead above her.

'Good Christ,' he groaned. 'What in hell happened?'

'I got so into the scenario, I forgot it wasn't real,' Kosutic admitted. 'Snarleyow's big enough that I could build two or three rooms into the hold, but there wasn't anything I could do about the vertical limits, and I got so involved I forgot that there couldn't really be a hole in the 'ceiling.' That's the upper cargo deck planking. There's not even a hatch.'

'Where's the targets?' Roger moaned pitifully. 'Where's the bead-cannon? Where's the door? We were doing so welll!'

Julian rolled over on his side, still laughing, while Despreaux climbed to her feet.

'Fortunately,' she observed with a disdainful glance at the giggling armorer, 'I'm not dead.'

'Oh, my head,' Roger said, ignoring her. 'I hate VR! Sergeant Major, did you just piledriver me into the ceiling?'

'That's more or less what I just said, Your Highness,' Kosutic said, still chuckling.

'Oooo,' Roger groaned. 'Can I just lie here for a while?'

CHAPTER SIX

BAM!

'Man, I want my bead rifle back!' Julian muttered as his round plunked into the water, well clear of the floating target.

He and Roger stood side by side at Ima Hooker's rail, between two of her starboard carronades. They'd just watched Rastar's team run through its own training on the schooner's main deck, and the experience had been fairly ... ominous. They were due to have their 'close contact' contest with the Mardukans the next morning, and it didn't look like it was going to be a walkover, even with Roger on point. The Vashin cavalry and selected Diaspran infantry who were going to act as the notional 'guards' on key defenses of the spaceport would be graded as having light body armor. And since all the Vashin carried at least three weapons, it was going to be interesting.

'You're just jealous,' Roger retorted as the floating barrel Julian had missed shattered from his own shot. 'And it pains your professional ego to be shooting a 'smoke pole,' ' he added with a grin.

The new rifles had been produced just in time for the battles around Sindi, and with their availability, the Marines had, for all practical purposes, put away their bead rifles until they reached the starport. The weapons had been designed using Roger's eleven-millimeter magnum Parkins and Spencer as a model, but modified in light of available technology.

The Parkins and Spencer's dual bolt-action/semi-automatic system had been impossible to duplicate, but the base for the bolt form was a modification of the ancient Ruger action, and that worked just fine. With the addition of scavenged battery packs from downchecked plasma rifles and various items of gear dead Marines no longer required, the electronic firing system built into the Parkins' cartridge cases also worked just fine. And since the prince had doggedly insisted on policing up his shooting stands whenever possible and dragging along the empty cases, there was sufficient brass to provide over two hundred almost infinitely reloadable rounds for each of the surviving Marines.

The black powder which was the most advanced form of explosives available on Marduk had made for a few compromises. One was that the rifles' slower-velocity bullets simply could not match the flat trajectory of a hypervelocity bead, which meant that at any sort of range, the barrel had to be elevated far beyond what any of the Marines were comfortable with. Which also explained why so many of their rounds tended to fall short.

'You can throw a rock faster than these bullets go,' Despreaux growled from Roger's other side. 'I still say that guncotton I made would have worked—and given us a hell of a lot better velocity, too!'

'Overpressure,' Roger commented with a shake of his head. 'And it was unstable as hell.'

'I was working on it!' she snapped.

'Sure you were ... and you're lucky you're not regrowing a set of fingers,' Julian told her with another chuckle as he fired again. This time the round was on range for the second barrel, but off to the left. 'Damn.'

'Windage,' Roger said laconically as he shattered that barrel, as well.

'Sight!' Julian snapped.

'Care to trade?' the prince offered with a smile.

'No,' the Marine replied promptly, and glowered at Despreaux when she snickered.

While a good bit of it was the sight, most of it—as Julian knew perfectly well—was the sighter.

'Seriously,' Roger said, gesturing for Julian's rifle. 'I'd like to try. I turn the sight off from time to time, but it's not the same. And what happens if I lose it?'

Julian shook his head and traded rifles.

'It's going to be a bit tough to zero,' he warned.

'Not really.' The prince looked the rifle over. He'd checked them out when the first of them came off the assembly line, even fired a few rounds through one of them. But that had been months ago, and he took the time to refamiliarize himself with the weapon. Especially with the differences between it and his own Parkins.

Dell Mir, the K'Vaernian inventor who'd designed the detailed modifications, had done a good job. The weapons were virtually identical, with the exception of removing the optional gas-blowback reloading system— which Roger had to disengage anyway, when he used black-powder rounds in the Parkins—and the actual materials